Health & WellnessS


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Broths Contain Mysterious Ingredients

Jack Challem
NaturalNews
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
There's a company that dominates the soup business, but its products are at best bland and mushy. You probably know who I'm talking about. Some of the company's soups contain so much salt that they're the human equivalent of a salt lick. For example, its chicken noodle soup dishes up a whopping 890 mg of sodium per serving, and 2,225 grams of sodium per can.

This company also owns the leading maker of various chicken broths and stocks. Until recently, that subsidiary spiked its tasteless products with monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavor enhancer. But MSG is well documented as a cause of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.

I'm not joking. Every Chinese restaurant used to boost the flavor of its meals by adding MSG. But a fair number of customers complained of neck and muscle aches afterwards, the result of MSG. So now, a lot of Chinese restaurants don't use MSG anymore.

But I digress.
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Cheeseburger

Yummy! Ammonia -Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef

Jennifer Poole
Alternet
Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:03 UTC
You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."
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Cow

An FDA Ban On Genetically-Engineered Milk Is 20 Years Overdue

Dr. Samuel Epstein
Huffington Post
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:24 UTC
In May 2007, I and four other leading national experts on genetically-engineered, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) milk filed a Petition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), "Petition Seeking the Withdrawal of the New Animal Drug Application Approval for Posilac-Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH)."

In the absence of any response, on January 12, 2010, I resubmitted this Petition to Michael Taylor, Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. As detailed in this Petition, Posilac poses major public health hazards. I requested his review and support of an early ban of Posilac.

This Petition requested the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Commissioner of Food and Drugs to take the following action:
Suspend the approval of rBGH, a genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, and require milk and other dairy products produced with its use to be labeled with a warning such as, "Produced with the use of rBGH, and contains elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor, IGF-1, which poses major risks of breast, prostate, and colon cancers."
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Attention

The Critical Role of Wheat in Human Disease


Dr. Mercola
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:17 UTC
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Lectin is a type of 'wheat germ agglutinin' (WGA) and glycoprotein. Through thousands of years of selectively breeding wheat for increasingly larger quantities of protein, the concentration of WGA lectin has increased proportionately.

WGA is largely responsible for many of wheat's pervasive ill effects.

What's more, WGA is found in highest concentrations in "whole wheat," including its supposedly superior sprouted form.

What is unique about the WGA glycoprotein is that it can do direct damage to the majority of tissues in your body without requiring a specific set of genetic susceptibilities or immune-mediated articulations.

This may explain why chronic inflammatory and degenerative conditions are endemic to wheat-consuming populations.

WGA lectin is an exceptionally tough adversary as it is formed by the same disulfide bonds that make vulcanized rubber and human hair so strong, flexible and durable.

Like man-made pesticides, lectins are extremely small, resistant to breakdown by living systems, and tend to accumulate and become incorporated into tissues where they interfere with normal biological processes.

At exceedingly small concentrations, WGA stimulates the synthesis of pro-inflammatory chemical messengers. WGA induces thymus atrophy in rats. WGA can pass through the blood-brain barrier. It may also interfere with gene expression and disrupt endocrine function.

Sources:

GreenMedInfo 2009
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Family

Drugs Like Tylenol Can Be Contaminated with Mold and Chemicals

S. L. Baker
NaturalNews
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:34 UTC
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prescription drugs kill about 40,000 Americans each year and over the counter drugs (OTC) -- from pain relievers to cough medicines -- cause thousands of additional deaths. Drugs can sicken, and sometimes kill, through side effects, allergic reactions, overdoses and interactions. And now there's another reason to worry about pills you put in your body. A recent recall of the OTC pain reliever Tylenol Arthritis Pain Caplets has revealed that drugs can be contaminated with mold and chemicals when they are transported and stored on "engineered wood" pallets.

In consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), McNeil Consumer Healthcare (a division of Big Pharma's Johnson & Johnson) recently expanded its voluntary recall to include all lots of Tylenol Arthritis Pain pills with the distinctive red EZ-open caps. The reason? The FDA received numerous complaints that the pills smelled like mold or mildew. What's more, after taking them, consumers said they suffered from nausea, vomiting, stomach pains and diarrhea.

The drug company press release about the recall discounted these physical complaints reported by people sickened by the musty smelling drugs, saying "to date all of the observed events reported to McNeil were temporary and non-serious". Obviously, however, if someone was already suffering from a serious illness involving their gastrointestinal tract, they might not equate a worsening of symptoms to the Tylenol they took -- or they might not even be well enough to file a report. So the actual number of people sickened by the contaminated pills, and the contribution of the bad meds to a person's illness, may never be fully known.
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Nutrients Stimulate Brain Connections, Could Treat Alzheimer's

Sherry Baker
NaturalNews
Sun, 17 Jan 2010 03:00 UTC
The earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are marked by a major loss of the brain connections needed to process information and to retain memory. While there are drug therapies used to help delay progression of AD, those medications are loaded with side effects and, if they work at all, the effects only last for the short term. Eventually the disease continues to rob those with Alzheimer's of their memory, thinking ability and quality of life.

But scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently discovered that a combination of naturally occurring nutrients could do what Big Pharma drugs can't. In research just published in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia, the nutrient mix stimulated the growth of new brain connections, technically known as synapses -- and the supplements were shown to have potential to improve memory in Alzheimer's patients.

Richard Wurtman, the Cecil H.Green Distinguished Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, did the basic research that led to the new experimental treatment and was part of the research team that conducted the clinical trial. Wurtman believes loss of synapses is the root cause of Alzheimer's disease. In previous animal studies, Wurtman has found that specific nutrients boost the number of dendritic spines (small outcroppings of neural membranes) and, when those spines contact other neurons, the formation of new synapses takes place. "If you can increase the number of synapses by enhancing their production, you might to some extent avoid that loss of cognitive ability (in Alzheimer's)," he said in a statement to the media.
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Family

Blood Pressure May Be Lowered By Raising Children

Joe Hadfield
Medical News Today
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
They turn Dad's hair gray, but children can now take partial credit for the health of Mom's heart.

A new Brigham Young University study found that parenthood is associated with lower blood pressure, particularly so among women.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a BYU psychologist who studies relationships and health, reports her findings Jan. 14 in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

Of course parenthood is not the only route to low blood pressure - daily exercise and a low-sodium diet also do the trick. The noteworthy aspect of the study is the idea that social factors may also protect physical health.
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Syringe

Thousands of Americans died from H1N1 even after receiving vaccine shots

Mike Adams
Natural News
Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:01 UTC
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The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I'm about to reveal here.

It all started with the CDC's recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates. According to the CDC:
  • 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a "success" even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines.
  • 55 million people "became ill" from swine flu infections.
  • 246,000 Americans were hospitalized due to swine flu infections.
  • 11,160 Americans died from the swine flu.
Base on these statistics, the CDC is now desperately urging people to get vaccinated because they claim the pandemic might come back and vaccines are the best defense.

But here's the part you're NOT being told.
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How Music "Moves" Us: Listeners' Brains Second Guess the Composer


Medical News Today
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:00 UTC
Have you ever accidentally pulled your headphone socket out while listening to music? What happens when the music stops? Psychologists believe that our brains continuously predict what is going to happen next in a piece of music. So, when the music stops, your brain may still have expectations about what should happen next.

A new paper published in NeuroImage predicts that these expectations should be different for people with different musical experience and sheds light on the brain mechanisms involved.

Research by Marcus Pearce Geraint Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya and their colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London has shown that expectations are likely to be based on learning through experience with music. Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."

The researchers asked 40 people to listen to hymn melodies (without lyrics) and state how expected or unexpected they found particular notes.
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Health

Flashback 'Superfood' celery combats brain diseases

Jonathan Leake
The Sunday Times
Sun, 18 May 2008 10:48 UTC
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Celery may not only be good for diets but also help safeguard mental health. Researchers have found that it generates compounds that can fight Alzheimer's and other degenerative diseases.

The compounds luteolin and diosmin appear to block the inflammation that causes the brains of victims to start shrinking and dying. In animal experiments they reduced the levels of amyloid beta, which forms the sticky deposits that build up in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's.

The chemicals belong to a group of plant-based compounds known as flavonoids. "Luteolin and diosmin could be used in purified form as therapeutic agents," said Dr Terrence.

Town of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. "The compounds have few side effects and are available as dietary supplements."
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